Most Eve players know the description text of the skill “Thermodynamics” which tells you to frown about a perpetuum mobile. But what about Perpetuum Online? Well CCP did, unvoluntarily, some advertising für Perpetuum when it launched Incarna and angry people in the forums posted links to alternative games, one of those is Perpetuum. These days on our RL corp meeting I glanced over someones shoulder when he played it. I got interested to explore the differences and commons by myself.

  1. Installation: You can download and install the client as easy and seamless as Eve’s.
  2. Account: Every created account comes with the usual 2 weeks trial. In this trial period you cannot access the player market and most other social and economic features are restricted. Subscriptions are non-recurring – you must explicitly activate the next game month. The price is lower: 1 month in Perpetuum ~ 9€ vs. 1 month in Eve ~15€.
  3. Character creation: looks alot like the old Eve-character creation: five steps of background story selections which decide about your initial extensions (Perpetuum-speak for skills) and attributes. As an Eve player you should have some intuition about what you get.
  4. Avatar portrait: A lot of settings to adjust, but the final image in the game is even smaller than in Eve. The optical features are worse than in the old Eve character portrait system.
  5. Tutorial: The tutorial consists of two parts. At first a basic tutorial teaching the controls. Then follows a series of quite interesting and diversive tutorial assignments (Perpetuum-speak for missions).
  6. After the tutorial: Now that I’ve mastered the basic assignmentd I feel a bit left alone. I see the same set of level 0 assignments in the Alpha bases, even the objective’s locations don’t change. So it yells a “Grind!” at me. Maybe the full account, with view to the market, could give some push via production. Or going into the null sec areas…?
  7. Pro: Everything feels like Eve with robots. Some things are even better: The GUI looks more modern and stable. You can’t miss starting a new skill (extension) – all extension points are accumulated onto the account and then spent into the skills.
  8. Contra: Everything feels like Eve with robots. Often you think “I know how that works, easy stuff”. Then again you have to learn a complete new nomenclature for things you already know. The area is quite small at the moment. And combat is more simple than in Eve. As I found in the forums, there seems to be no angle/vector calculation on attacks, no thing like tracking, signature radius or speed tanking – although in a WASD-controlled game one would expect some bonus from skillful movements and the right attack angle

Fazit: Made very well, it is a promising newcomer. Nevertheless it is not tempting enough to divert me from the Eve sandbox. Or, told the other way: although I’m not doing much in Eve it takes up all my designated gaming time.

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